Archive for September, 2014

I’ve had one week of vacation which was a great chance to implement some features I wanted to have in uPod already since some time and here are the results! One of the bigger changes is the possibility to sort a podcast’s episodes starting with the oldest. This is especially useful if you discovered a new podcast and want to listen to it starting from the beginning.

Another important feature for podcasts which do not deliver the full show notes in their RSS is the new “Open in browser” button below an episode’s show notes: It open’s the episode’s link in your system’s browser. If your podcast publisher has done his job well, this will bring you to the full show notes of the episode. Notice that not all podcast providers put a link element into their RSS, so you will not see this button for all episodes.

If you are using multiple podcast players, you might like the new OPML export. This feature allows you to export your uPod podcast subscriptions in the standard OPML format which is understood by most feed readers and podcast players.

A tiny change makes the “Play next” action more useful: It still adds the affected episode to the second position of the playlist when currently a playback is running or paused, but if no playback is active it adds the episode to the top of the playlist which might be your intention in this case.

A new option to skip not downloaded episodes on the playlist avoids you from getting ruined as uPod will no longer automatically start to stream when you are on a mobile network. And finally the new action to delete a whole podcast including all of it’s episodes makes it easier for you to get rid of podcasts you don’t like any more without needing to delete all of it’s episodes manually.

Starting with the next release (which is coming very soon) uPod will only support English and German language — the two translations I can maintain on my own. It wasn’t an easy descision to dismiss the Polish and Russion translation especially because the two maintainers of these languages have invested quite some time and have done a great job, but from my point of view it was necessary. These are the reasons:

The several languages made me slow as I needed to wait for the translations to be finished before being able to publish a new release. Both translators were quite fast, but this still meant one to five days delay.

Providing support for Russian and Polish users wasn’t always easy, as they used the Russian and Polish action names in their requests which I couldn’t map to anything I know.

The translation service I’ve used (Crowdin) is too expensive for such small projects like uPod and has recently further increased it’s price. I needed to sell a lot of licenses each month just to get this service paid. And then I need to sell much more to get the server bills paid. At the moment uPod costs me quite some money and I wanted to reduce the costs.

I am really sorry for those of you how invested time into the translations and for those of you who got used to them. But I am happy to be more agile again :-)